Privacy Policy

Last updated: 25 August 2026

The Crest app has no servers, no accounts, and no analytics. Your surfs are stored on your device and synced through your own private iCloud, so they follow you between your iPhone and iPad. That sync is encrypted by Apple and tied to your Apple ID. We cannot read any of it, and neither can anyone else.

The short version

No account, ever. There is nothing to sign up for and no email required to use Crest.
No analytics, no tracking, no ads in the app. Crest contains no third-party SDKs of any kind. This website counts page views; see This website below.
No servers of ours. We operate no backend that receives your data.
Private sync. Your data syncs through your own iCloud account, which we cannot access.

What Crest stores

Only what you enter: the urges you log, when they started and ended, the category and trigger you picked, how strong it was, any note you wrote, and your settings. Nothing is derived about you beyond the statistics shown to you inside the app.

Where it lives

On your device, and in your own private CloudKit database if you are signed into iCloud. A private CloudKit database is readable only by the Apple ID that owns it. As the developer of Crest, we have no ability to query it, browse it, or see that it exists. It is governed by Apple's Privacy Policy.

If you are signed out of iCloud, or you turn iCloud off for Crest in iOS Settings, the app keeps working exactly as before. Your data simply stays on that one device.

What we can see

Nothing from inside the app. There is no dashboard, no logging, no crash reporter, and no event tracking in Crest. We learn about problems the same way any other user would: by someone telling us.

Notifications

Reminders and the optional heads-up before your usual urge window are scheduled on your device by your device. Nothing is sent through a push server, and the times are calculated locally from your own history. Notifications are off until you turn them on, and you can revoke permission at any time in iOS Settings.

Surf Crew

Earlier versions of Crest included Surf Crew, an optional feature for surfing alongside a small group. It was retired, and as of version 1.6 it is removed from the app entirely.

While it was available, a crew record held a randomly generated crew code, anonymous member identifiers, and aggregate counts such as how many surfs the crew completed that week. It never contained journal entries, notes, categories, individual session times, names, or anything identifying. Those records are being wound down, and the app no longer reads or writes them.

Third parties

Crest integrates no third-party analytics, advertising, attribution, or tracking services. The only external system the app involves is Apple's own iCloud, described above. This website is hosted by Vercel and counts page views, described next.

This website

Everything above is about the Crest app, and all of it stays true. This section is about urgesurfing.app, the page you are reading, because a privacy policy that is silent on its own website is an incomplete one.

The site uses Vercel Web Analytics to count visits. It records the page viewed, the referring site, an approximate country, and the kind of browser and device. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, and has no way to identify you, follow you to another site, or connect a visit to anything in the app. The numbers exist so we know whether anyone found the page.

None of this touches the app. Crest itself contains no analytics of any kind, and nothing on this website can see or affect what is in it.

Deleting your data

Delete any individual surf from your history inside the app.
Delete the app to remove everything stored on that device.
To remove the synced copy as well, open iOS Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Crest, and delete its data.

Children

Crest is not directed at children under 13 and collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

Changes to this policy

If how Crest handles data ever changes, this page will be updated before the change ships, and the date at the top will move.

Contact

Questions about any of this come straight to me.

beracasaalejandro@icloud.com